PHNOM PENH, Nov 10 (AFP) - Unhampered by government regulations or even basic standards of hygiene, Cambodia's booming cut-price comestic surgery industry has become the latest fad for a swelling elite class.

But health experts warn the clinics, operating in dusty backrooms and among the cheapest in the world, are presenting clients with serious health risks.

"Anyone can open a clinic and perform an operation without having any qualifications which is why there are so many of these clinics now," said health ministry official Chin Chheav.

The lack of regulation in the health sector means low costs. Cosmetic surgery clinics charge as little as 60 US dollars for a nose job and 200 dollars for a face-lift.

Other bargain services available include breast enlargements or fat removal for as little as 300 dollars -- a fraction of the price of similar surgery abroad.

But while the government complains it lacks the resources to enforce minimum standards, experts warn the clinics risk giving patients much more than they bargained for.

Aside from risk of contracting HIV/AIDS or Hepatitis B, such conditions are a hazard for countless other potentially deadly infections that thrive in the warm, damp and seldom washed environments.

Sitting in one Phnom Penh clinic, a customer who gave her name as Moi said that even though some of her operations had been "less than 100 percent successful," she kept going back for more.

"It is very important to look beautiful and young," she said with a broad permanent smile that came courtesy of a cheek-bone enhancement and face-lift.

"Otherwise my husband will run away with other women," she explained, blissfully unaware of the cockroach scuttling along the floor of the clinic waiting room into the operating theatre.

The booming business is just one alarming part of Cambodia's unregulated health sector, where pharmacists, doctors and surgeons of dubious skills can operate free of any binding minimum standards.

Pharmacists often recommend medications for the most obscure reasons: "The red ones, they are great for a stomach ache," said one pharmacist while pointing vaguely to an array of red-coloured antibiotics, contraceptive pills and anti-inflammatory tablets.

It is also an industry where patients have little recourse through a health ministry that most foreign medical workers complain is dogged by corruption and without the will to step on the toes of the booming private sector.

But with Phnom Penh's rich and famous eager to keep up with a jet-set where appearences are everything, customers keep coming back for more.

Another patient, whose face also represented an ideal case study on plastic surgery mishaps, said she was back for corrective surgery after a particularly painful face lift.

"I've been in terrible pain," she complained, visibly shocked by the result of the operation.

However the surgeon had kindly offered a cut-price second session to repair the damage of the first brutal operation: "My husband is a general," she explained.

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